Most people are familiar with the idea of revision long before they actually attempt to do it for themselves. Children’s TV and coming-of-age films are littered with scenes of stressed-out teens cramming for tests, meeting for study sessions or ducking out for adventures when they should be hitting the books.
In fact, revision can seem so ubiquitous that it appears it is just something that we innately do. Teachers can fall into the trap of simply directing students to “go and revise” without ever teaching them how to go about it, which means that they are left not knowing where to start and either don’t do it or do it badly.
Research-backed revision techniques
1. The pomodoro technique
The first thing we need to teach our students is how to approach their revision time. Setting aside a whole weekend, or even an entire evening, for revision can feel daunting. The problem with such long periods is that we don’t value that time. There is no scarcity. No need to concentrate on the task at hand. This is not helpful when it comes to revision because we need sustained concentration to think deeply about the topic.
This is where a kitchen timer comes in handy. It does not need to be in the shape of a tomato, which gave its name to the Italian pomodoro technique. It just needs to be something that breaks the time up into more manageable chunks.
The idea is that a student will set their timer for 25 minutes and focus on revising for that time. When the timer rings, they take a five-minute break before returning to another 25-minute session. And so on. Knowing that they only have 25 minutes creates a sense of scarcity and makes it less likely that they’ll fill the time by doing other things.
2. The Feynman technique
Physicist Richard Feynman devised a simple method to support study. At its heart is the idea that we want to understand something, however complex, to the point where we could explain it to a child. This involves a number of different steps.
- Study the material and explain it as though to a child.
- Identify any gaps in your knowledge.
- Simplify and clarify your explanation.
- Review and repeat.
As simple as this method is, it does pose a question: how should a student go about each of these stages? Let us consider.
3. Study the material: mind mapping
Firstly, the student needs to actually study the thing that they want to revise. There can be a temptation here to just read back through their notes, perhaps with a highlighter in hand. However, this doesn’t involve the student having to think very hard about the material and so leaves them unlikely to learn it. Studying the material should mean doing something with it.
Mind mapping can help.This involves sifting through information and then considering how it can best be organised under different headings. For example, if a student wanted to revise why tectonic events produce different hazards, they might divide their mind map into volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, then divide the volcano stem into physical and human factors, then divide the physical factor stem into different lava types, explosivity, predictability and so on. Sorting the information in this way forces the mind to think about the information rather than the eye just gliding over it.
4. Explain it to a child: peer learning and self-explaining
It can sometimes be assumed that peer learning, one student teaching another student something, benefits the student who is being taught. But I would suggest it actually benefits the one doing the teaching. They are the peer who is learning.
The advantage of peer learning is that it makes the student think about how the idea they are studying can best be expressed. It means that they take knowledge that might be very tacit and put it into a more concrete form. This could be done without a peer present, as self-explaining, but the advantage of having someone there to actually explain it to is that they don’t gloss over this important step. It can be too easy to just assume that we can explain something without actually trying it.
5. Identify gaps in knowledge: self-testing
Another advantage of explaining something to a person who is there in front of us is that they can ask us questions. I might think that I have explained that the severity of volcanic eruptions can be down to the lava type, but a child (or peer) hearing that explanation is very likely to want to know why different types of lava have different impacts and why the lava types differ to begin with. This will reveal gaps in knowledge.
If a student has written out their self-explanation then they can go through it themselves and identify anywhere that someone could ask the question “why?”. They can then make a list of things that they need to be able to answer.
Once they have a list of the gaps in their knowledge, a useful revision technique is to create flashcards for self-testing. The student writes the question on one side of the card and the answer on the other. Simply creating these cards is very useful in itself but they also mean that students can constantly review their progress, discarding cards that they repeatedly get right and returning to ones that they continue to struggle with.
6. Simplify and clarify: summaries and drawing
The next step is to look back at the explanation and think about how it could be made simpler, or more clear, given the gaps in knowledge that have now been addressed.
One way to see if you can simplify an explanation is to write a summary of it. Can you now boil it down to a series of ordered bullet points? Perhaps putting an explanation into chronological order or in order of significance?
Another way to clarify your thinking is to turn text into an image. By drawing out ideas for which we have to think carefully about what they actually mean, we can select a way to show them. In the example above, a student might turn their explanation of why some volcanoes are more hazardous than others into a diagram of contrasting two volcano types.
7. Review and repeat: spaced practice
It might be that having restudied a topic, turned it into an explanation that a child can understand and drawn it out, a student feels confident that they now understand it. But will they be so confident in two days’ time? Or a week? Or a month? It is important that we help students to see revision of a topic not as something to tick off but as something to return to.
We benefit from regularly coming back to our learning at spaced intervals, rather than doing a lot of revision on it all in one go.
Having spent some time revising tectonic hazards, a student will be better off moving on to a new geography topic, or a different subject, but with a clear plan for when they will come back to it in the future.
Mark Enser, a former head of department and research lead, is an author and freelance writer
